Monday morning greetings from Santa Fe, New Mexico!!!

Wow, the Super Bowl, yawn!!! The Super Bowl commercials, yawn!!! For all the build up and the hype for the big game, the NFL laid a big goose egg! Blow out games are never entertaining unless your team is the one that’s blowing out the opposition!!! I have a feeling that Animal Plant’s “Puppy Bowl” got better ratings then that yawner!!!!! For the most part the commercials were bad as well! It was funny becuase every-time I would watch a bad one, I would say to the room, “There’s another four million dollars down the drain”! Yes, 30 second spots were four million a pop! Scary but true!!!!

It’s the first road trip of the year and we’ve got a great spot to be shooting, Santa Fe, NM!!! We’ll be shooting for Modern Quilts Unlimited magazine and it should be a lot of fun! The colors and textures out here are inspiring and hopefully we’ll be able to bring that out in our photos!!!!

I’m still banging my drum about lighting!!! It’s been amazing to me over the last five or so years how we in the advertising world have gotten away from doing lighting on people and products. I know that this is an old school thing because back in the day you had to do lighting becuase of the cameras and film. With today’s modern digital cameras, it’s not necessary to do lighting to get a good photo, but we are missing out on the mood that can be created with lighting! There is a drama and mood that is created when you light up a subject and most of the photos that I’m shooting for clients these days lack that dramatic look. There are a host of reasons from our new cameras, time is money and budgets have been squeezed, to “It’s good enough”! It’s sad to see because I think about the lack of impact that photos are missing today!

Here’s a shot that we did last week for my friends at Simformotion and this is one of my clients that does see the need to have photos with impact for their products. Taking a little bit of time and doing some creative and dramatic lighting, we are able to take a product that might not be all that exciting and turn it into an interesting and attention getting photograph! Hopefully as time goes on, more and more clients will want their products and people to stand out and have impact!!!

It’s time to get busy and Santa Fe is waiting, I’ve got lighting and photography to do!!!! 🙂

I hope that you have a great week as always and thanks for taking the time to check out my work!!!

Kev

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Arctic cold Monday morning greetings to one and all from the frozen city of Peoria!!!!

From my intro can you tell that we here in the Midwest and Central Illinois are sick of winter and ready for spring? If not, we are! The last couple of winters in Peoria have been fairly mild and personally that type of winter isn’t too upsetting to me and others! We’d have a few cold days and then we’d hit some nicer weather in the 30’s to 40’s and that was pretty darn nice! This year over the last month or so we’ve been rocked with these extreme polar blasts time and time again and this morning is no exception! With temperatures in in the -10 range and wind chill’s in the -20 and below area, this winter is getting old real fast!!!! Having spent two weeks in Hawaii in December, I’m ready to get the heck out of here again and avoid some of this nasty cold weather again!!!! We’ll see!!!!

This weekend we were able to head South of Peoria and hit St. Louis and enjoy a little bit of a reprieve from winters blast!!! Sad to say that even they won’t be able to avoid this cold today!!!! Here’s a couple snaps of my from Sunday at the Arch and it was gorgeous with temperatures in the high 50’s and a very nice sunny day!!! It almost made me think of spring!!!!!

For my friends North of the Mason-Dixon Line, here’s hoping that you are going to stay warm the next couple of days!!!! For those of you South and West of the MD Line, we don’t want to hear it!!!!

Have a great week as always and stay warm!!!! 🙂

Kev

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Monday morning peoria greetings to one and all!

Some of my friends might have the day off for the Martin Luther King holiday and some of my friends like me will be working!

I’m getting back into the flow of things work wise and had a number of shoots this past week! This has always been a slow time of the year for me, so any work is always a nice excuse to get out of the house!!!! I’m usually working on the computer and trying to get things caught up and finished up for 2013. As winter rolls along and things start to warm up and green up, that’s when things will start to get busy for me!

I was able to get out on Sunday morning before all of the NFL games in the afternoon and shoot a couple of shots of Peoria! We’ve been having these cold snaps that come into the area, but today it was pretty nice with the temperature in the high 30’s and sunny! We will all take more days like that!!!!! Here’s one of my snaps of Peoria and the city was looking good today!!!!!

Thanks as always for taking the time to check out my work and I hope that you have a wonderful week!!!

Kev

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Monday morning Peoria greetings to one and all!

What a difference a week makes! Last week we had below zero temperatures and wind chills that would rival the Arctic! This weekend in Peoria, the temperature got back to normal and even a little about at 40 degrees and you’d think that people were ready to break the summer shorts out! Winter’s not over by a long shot, but it sure has been nice to have a few days like we’ve been having as of late!!!!

One of the questions that I’ll get from people is “What’s your favorite or the best photo that you’ve ever taken?” To me, that’s always a very hard question because I like to think that my most recent work is always my best work. By that I think that I continue to learn and get better as a photographer everyday that I’m shooting photos! I feel like if your attitude as a creative person is that “I know it all” and I can’t learn anything new about my craft, your time is over! From that point forward, you’ll probably never progress and get better at what you do!!

I always enjoy looking back on the year to see what I’ve shot and to pick out some of my best work. It can be very hard when I look at all the photos that I’ve shot in a given year to just pick ten photos out of that year. 2013 was no exception and I started pulling some images and ended up with about 20 that I really liked and from there I had to whittle it down to my ten best! Very difficult indeed!!!!

Here’s my ten best photos for 2013 and I’ve added some notes for each of the photos with a little more info for those that want to know a little bit more!

Thanks as always for taking the time to check out my work and I do very much appreciate it!!! 🙂

Have a great week to come!!!!!

Kev

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2013TopTen